Kurt Vonnegut only managed to sell two short storiesin 1957, and the next year he placed just one. His work-in-progress Cat's Cradle remained unfinished, and Vonnegut's editor at Scribner's, who had been waiting for four years for this novelto reach fruition, complainedthat the "production has beenvery slow." Unless Vonnegutprovided his publisher with afinished manuscript or at leasta complete outline—both ofwhich he seemed incapable ofdoing—Scribner's wouldneither offer him a contractnor release him from theiroption on Cat's Cradle.

Yet the author had otherconcerns that kept him fromcompleting the book. In a desperate bid to improve his financial prospects, Vonnegut embarked on a disastrous career running a car dealership. Personal tragedy added to his woes. His sister Alice died of cancer in 1958, just two days after husband was killed in a train wreck—leaving Kurt and his wife Jane with the care of four orphaned youngsters. In addition to their own three children, Vonnegut now had seven kids to support.

At this low point, pressed by need and uncertainty, Vonnegut encountered his old Cornell classmate Knox Burger, now an editor at Dell, at a New York cocktail party. Burger asked whether Vonnegut had any ideasfor a marketable novel. Seizing the opportunity, Kurt spun out a fanciful synopsis of a science fiction space opera that would turn into The Sirens of Titan. Offereda contract for the book, Vonnegut completed the manuscript in just a few months. In 1959, Dell released the book to modest critical acclaim, but The Sirens of Titan earned a Hugo nomination for novel of the year, and over time gained a cult following. Its admirers would eventually include Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, who purchased the movie rights, and novelist Douglas Adams, who cited Vonnegut's work as an influence on his The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

At first glance, The Sirens of Titan comes across as a flippant tale, a haphazard, loosely-organized narrative that bounces around much like its major protagonists—Malachi Constant, the millionaire who turns into a destitute space wanderer, and Winston Niles Rumfoord, the visionary who is caught in a space-time continuum that sends him skittering about the galaxy like a pinball in an oversized arcade game. The same is true of the supporting characters in this work, none of whom might be called "grounded"—either physically or psychologically.

But the lack of a taut narrative is part of Vonnegut's intended effect. The fickleness of chance and destiny are a major of theme of this novel—and an appropriate theme for an author who had suffered from random, unpredictable acts of violence over and over again during his brief life. While other writers draw on what they learned in a MFA program, Vonnegut's stock of personal experiences included his mother's suicide (on Mother's Day, no less), his internment as a prisoner of war in World War II, a role-reversal that found him as the target of American attacks in the bombing of Dresden, the early death of his sister, his custody of his orphaned nephews, his financial struggles and thwarted literary ambitions. If Vonnegut knocked around his characters like so many bowling ball pins, it was only because he felt himself similarly mistreated by an apathetic universe.

In fact, below the surface of this apparently formless story, Vonnegut has constructed his own alternative theology—one might that explain his own life as well as that of his characters. The Sirens of Titan can even be read as detailed parody of the Bible, complete with Old Testament, New Testament, and Book of Revelation. Toward the beginning of the novel, Vonnegut presents us with Noel Constant, Malachi’s father (and stand-infor God the Father), who builds the family wealth by buying stocks based on the words in the Book of Genesis. Later Malachi undergoes a series of Christ-like trials and tribulations, that include more-or-less evocative equivalents of a tempting in the desert on the planet Mercury, a Palm Sunday return to earth amid short-lived accolades that soon turn to public humiliation on a scaffold, but with a spaceship insteadof a cross, and even a final ascension into Paradise.

This alternative Biblical narrative would be easy for casual readers to miss, masked by Vonnegut's campy tone and zany plotting. But he brings the theological elements into the fore with a subplot about Rumfoord's attempt to establish a new religion. To lay the ground-work for his innovative belief system, Rumfoord sets in motion a bloody war between Mars and Earth, which leaves the victorious terrestrials with so much residual guilt that three billion people eventually embrace his Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.

The creed of this anti-church can be summed up in its most cherished confession, uttered by its Christ-figure on his return to earth: "I was a victim of a series of accidents, as are we all." Here’s a typical psalm: "O lord Most High, what a glorious weapon is Thy Apathy, for we have unsheathed it, have thrust and slashed mightily with it, and the claptrap that has so often enslaved us or driven us into the madhouse lies slain." Rumfoord even distributes a revised Bible, so that scripture comes into alignment with his new theology.

"I deal with sophomoric questions that full adults regard as settled," Vonnegut would later explain, when asked why he had such a large following among younger readers. But this attitude, shaped by the author's personal history, was emblematic of a larger shift insci-fi taking place at the time Vonnegut wrote TheSirens of Titan. During the decade following its publication, science fiction would become increasingly focused on spirituality and religious institutions—which would become almost as popular as spaceships or time travel in the leading works of the era. We encounter this sociological-theological tilt in classic novels such as A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960), Stranger in a Strange Land(1961), Dune (1965), Lord of Light (1967), and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)—each of which would win the Hugo for best novel in its respective year. Science fiction was in the process of moving beyond technology and gadgetry, asking deeper questions, and Vonnegut was at the forefront of this shift. I’m hardly surprised that an especially ambitious science fiction writer even promoted a successful real-life religion around this same time Vonnegut came of age as a writer. That kind of storefront marketing of religion to the masses had no appeal for the author of The Sirens of Titan, an avowed atheist. Yet even he felt that the rituals and traditions of Judeo-Christian belief systems could serve not only as a proper vehicle for science fiction, but as a frameworkfor his own renunciation of religion. These biggerissues constantly hover below, and above, the surfaceof a novel that, at first blush, seems little more than a picaresque space opera.

Vonnegut's fans will also see hints of his later works in The Sirens of Titan. The space-time traveler Winston Niles Rumfoord anticipates Billy Pilgrim, unstuck in time in Slaughterhouse-Five. The disastrous Martian attack on earth is a forerunner of the bombing of Dresden, which looms large in that same novel. The flippant theology of The Sirens of Titan looks ahead to the Bokonism of Cat's Cradle and the hand-wringing over free will in Breakfast of Champions. Vonnegut's well-known dystopian short story "Harrison Bergeron," with its skeptical look at social engineering schemes to enforce equality, also finds a forerunner here in a subplot about self-imposed physical constraints adopted by zealous adherents of Rumfoord’s religion.

No, this is not Vonnegut's finest work, but there is enough substance here to warrant the close attention of those who have enjoyed his better known novels. The Sirens of Titan came out at the beginning of a period of change and re-evaluation—not just for science fiction, but even more for the broader society—and this is one of the first works to capture the emerging ethos. Yet this novel is more than just a harbinger of the 1960s; a host of later writers, from Terry Pratchett to Christopher Moore, would find that its tone and attitude could inspire them as they wrestled with the different issues of later decades. I will leave it to others to construct additional lineages for Vonnegut, ones that link him to later postmodern approaches, various rock bands, styles of comedy, and a host of other cultural artifacts, high and low. The bottom line is that, in the years following the release of The Sirens of Titan, he became a titanic siren himself, and this both lightweight and deep book was where many of his distinctiverefrains first found expression.